S.F.'s oldest alt arts group in trouble

Updated 2:58 pm, Friday, May 23, 2014

Intersection for the Arts, San Francisco's nearly 50-year-old multidisciplinary alternative arts space, announced Thursday that it will cease to produce its own work and that of its four resident companies as of June 1.

Yancy Widmer, chair of the board of directors, and outgoing interim Executive Director Arthur Combs detailed what they called the restructuring of the organization. Due to "deeply challenged" finances, the board is laying off most of the staff and reverting to a fiscal sponsorship and rental space model. The performance programs announced through this summer will take place as scheduled.

"The action wasn't a surprise," says Sean San José, Intersection's performing arts director and co-founder of resident theater company Campo Santo. "The severity of it was. The idea that the programming could not exist is something of a shock to me."

San José and two of his fellow program directors, Kevin B. Chen and Rebeka Rodriguez, will be laid off as of May 31, along with most of the staff. Artist resources program director Randy Rollison will become the new interim executive director, working with the board and remaining staff to determine the organization's future.

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"Ironically," San José observes, the move comes on the heels of one of Campo Santo's "most impactful and successful productions," the sold-out run of Chinaka Hodge's "Chasing Mehserle," which closes this weekend before a brief move to Z Space. The show may return to Intersection for an extended run after that, he adds.

Intersection has survived straitened circumstances several times since it was founded in North Beach in the 1960s as a collaborative venture by several faith-based organizations wanting to serve disadvantaged youth as well as provide support for artists who declared themselves conscientious objectors during the Vietnam War.

Its mission evolved over time and moves to different neighborhoods. But it has remained focused on community, working with such artists as Whoopi Goldberg, Ishmael Reed, Alice Walker, Jessica Hagedorn, Joe Goode, Michael Ondaatje, Denis Johnson, Gary Snyder, Dave Eggers, Marcus Shelby and many more.

A few years ago, Intersection left its longtime Mission District home because the building it was renting needed major renovation, moving to the first floor and basement of 925 Mission St., in the same building as The Chronicle. Longtime Executive Director Deborah Cullinan, widely credited with having saved the group from its last financial crisis, left last year to become director of the much larger Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

Still optimistic

"It's not like our boxes are packed and we'll be leaving," San José says, adding that details of Intersection's future relationship with its now former resident companies and about 100 loosely affiliated resident artists remain to be worked out. "We'll be part of the transition process," he adds, cautiously optimistic. "We have to work out what Intersection wants and will have the means to produce.

"In hindsight, we achieved a small miracle with Deborah. It isn't that the programs we developed aren't working. It's that all the changes in the city are shaking what had become a ragged financial structure, and we have to see where we go from here. But this is the Bay Area. There's always going to be a way."